Ryle's criticisms of Cartesian Dualism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Ryle's criticisms of Cartesian Dualism - Essay Example In the physical world, people can communicate, but the mental conscious world is completely hidden from view and unknowable by others. To the question of what kind of knowledge can be obtained by the minds workings, the Cartesian dualist perspective asserts that consciousness is able to get a good grasp of the present workings of ones mind, which cannot be shaken as unreal, in spite of inputs by Freud with regard to some unconscious, subconscious impulses that can also govern the conscious processes. The data is presented within the immediate time frame, available to the consciousness or mind. Together with this data are the fruits of one person’s going into himself, introspectively, to examine his minds contents as a kind of self-observation. The other, meanwhile, is not privy and is completely shut out of this immediate consciousness experience. Even language is said to reflect this view of consciousness as something innate and to which the external actions in the environmen t register and make impressions. Ryle calls this whole infrastructure of thought the ghost in the machine dogmatic formulation. He contests this dogma on several grounds and objects to its validity. Ryle testifies that the whole ghost in the machine infrastructure or theory of mind is completely false (Ryle, 1949, pp. 11-16) â€Å"I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake (Ryle, Descartes myth, 1949, pp. 15-16, Paragraph #2) The core of the objection is with regard to the Cartesian view of the dualism of mind and body as a category mistake and a myth of the philosopher, meaning that in essence those mental processes are miscategorized and made to fit a category to which they do not belong. Ryle